The hand of history is sometimes cruel. After enjoying status as an international diamond trading hub, Goa is now concerned about turning into a major coal importing hub in Indo-Pacific. Since there is a lot of attention to coal in local public discourse, people have forgotten the position of Goa in a related commodity- diamonds. Diamond and coal offer stark contrasts.
Diamond and coal are allotropes of carbon. Diamond is defined as a glimmering glass-like mineral that is an allotrope of carbon in which each atom is surrounded by four others in the form of a tetrahedron. Coal is defined as a black rock formed from prehistoric plant remains, composed largely of carbon and burned as a fuel.
Ten thousand printed pages would not be sufficient if the state government plans to publish the history of diamond trade in Goa through the ages. Renowned maritime historian Pius Malekandthil and late Indo-Portuguese historian Teotonio De Souza and dozens of international scholars have provided enough documented evidence of Goa’s flourishing diamond trade.
Teotonio De Souza has given detailed information in his 1996 chapter –‘A New Account of Diamond Mines in the Deccan’. Malekandthil in his exhaustive paper (2014) ‘Indian Ocean in the Shaping of Late Medieval India. Studies in History, 30(2), 125–149’.He mentions: “By 1750s, the traders from the Saraswat Brahmin business families, such as the Mhamais, Kushta Sinai Dhempe, Govind Sinai Navelkar, Shaba Sinai, Anta Sinai and Rama Pai, who were involved in transoceanic trade with Brazil, Mozambique and Macao, emerged as merchant capitalists in Goa, where later its capital Panjim was built with the wealth obtained as customs duties from these merchants.
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